On Agate Hill by Lee Smith. Algonquin, $24.95. Raised in the ruin of the post-Civil War American South, young Molly Petree, now orphaned, has no intention of wasting time on self-pity. So, when a mysterious benefactor appears out of her father's past to rescue her, she doesn't look back--until she is an old woman and returns to the farm on Agate Hill.
Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch. HarperCollins, $24.95. From Pen/Malamud winner Bausch comes a rich and moving novel about two eccentric families in a small Virginia town, set during the Thanksgiving season. SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE.
The Quick-Change Artist: Stories by Cary Holladay. Swallow Press, $28.95 hardcover, $16.95 softcover. In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic. SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE.
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Random House, $23.95. From award-winning writer Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. "Black Swan Green" tracks a single year in what is, for 13-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami. Knopf, $24.95. Following the bestselling triumph of "Kafka on the Shore," Murakami returns with a collection of stories that generously expresses his masterful fiction-writing skills. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of the human experience.
The Stories of Mary Gordon. Pantheon, $26.00. From an admired writer comes this comprehensive collection of superb short fiction, spanning her entire career.
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski. Pantheon, $26.00. A pastiche of Joyce and Beckett, with heapings of Derrida's "Glas" and Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" thrown in for good measure, Danielewski's follow-up to "House of Leaves" is a similarly dizzying tour of the modernist and postmodernist heights--and a similarly impressive tour de force.
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford. Knopf, $26.95. With "The Sportswriter," in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later--after "Independence Day"--won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, Frank Bascombe's story resumes, in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together.
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman. Morrow, $26.95. The author of the #1 "New York Times" bestselling "Anansi Boys" releases his second collection of short fiction. "Fragile Things" includes a novella featuring the hero of Gaiman's masterpiece "American Gods" and charts the terrain between life and death, perception and reality, darkness and light.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, $24.00. At once brutal and tender, despairing and rashly hopeful, spare of language and profoundly moving, this work is a fierce and haunting meditation on the tenuous divide between civilization and savagery, and the essential, sometimes terrifying power of filial love.
The Collected Stories by Amy Hempel. Scribner, $27.50. With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. Putnam, $25.95. In this extraordinary thriller, rich in the atmospheres of medieval and contemporary France, the lives of two women born centuries apart are linked by a common destiny. SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE.